A man sways alone playing a saxophone in Belfast. An organ in Gloucester Cathedral wheezes and churns its high pipes. Everton fans belt out chants. In Brighton, strangers share chips and crisps on a seafront bench, and drop cans by the microphone.

Somehow, they've all been pulled together to make music. At 24 sites around Britain this weekend, sounds are being picked up by microphones and sent in real time via the net to a computer at the FACT Gallery in Liverpool, where a project five years in the organisation turns the signals into music. In a rather clever way. Almost too clever: but pay attention.

Nick Ryan, a Bafta award-winning composer, with Jane Grant and John Matthias, his colleagues in this Fragmented Orchestra, last year won music's equivalent of the Turner Prize, the £50,000 PRS New Music Award. They've slowly, lovingly, set up this network to take in sounds and process them via 24 "artificial neurons" - pieces of written software in the computer - set to "spike" and fire according to the type and level of sound picked up around the country. These echo the firing of the synapses in the human brain and, most crucially, bounce the processed signals into one another, letting them warp, weave, fluctuate, clash, accidentally, harmonise. The result could be horrid. It's not. It is, at many times, beautiful. Jane eulogises the novelty: "It would be hard otherwise to have imagined these sounds." The Fragmented Orchestra begs about 80 big questions, the answer to just about any one of which might pretty much solve the human condition. What, for instance, denotes musical authorship? "The very fact that we did it, basically," answers Nick. Is there a necessity for meaning in a piece of music? Can something be said to be humanly created if it's simply using accidents and technology? (Well, yes, it strikes me, after meeting these three charmers: the parameters they programme prevent the result being just too unlistenable, fans though they all are of John Cage.) How much should listeners have to work at something? How much context should they possess? Should we know anything about music in order to enjoy it?

Talk to these three and you will never run out of questions. I'm not sure if it's the future of music. I am sure it is not, as the promotional online video says, going to "condense space, and reconfigure time". There's a crying need to separate the clever people doing clever new things from the wagon-jumpers making mouth-music. But there is something very clever, and at times very beautiful, going on; and some very big questions are beginning to be, very slowly, very cleverly, answered.